Hatchery system helps maintain fish populations in state lakes

Sit down with 10 anglers and ask them what their favorite fish is. You're just as likely to get 10 answers as one.

Andrew D. Brosig

Sit down with 10 anglers and ask them what their favorite fish is. You're just as likely to get 10 answers as one.

“The most popular fish would depend on which fisherman you talked to,” said Dan Mosier II, fish culturist at the Farlington Lake Fish Hatchery. “Die-hard crappie fishermen will tell you they're the best. Die-hard walleye fishermen will tell you they're the best.”

Whatever the species is the target when an angler picks up a rod and reel and heads to the lake, there's a pretty good chance it got some help from captive breeding and stocking programs at a Kansas state fish hatchery.

Left to their own devices, most fish species can and will establish a population in a given body of water and that population will be healthy and stable, Mosier said. But when you figure in the added pressure of fishing, those populations can rapidly be diminished.

And that's where the fish hatcheries enter the picture. The Kansas Dept. of Wildlife and Parks operates four hatcheries across the state: At Meade in southwest Kansas, Pratt in the south-central region, Milford in the northeast part of the state and at Farlington Lake here in Southeast Kansas.

Each year, the hatchery system produces about 39.5 million fry, 3.5 million fingerlings and almost 400,000 intermediate-sized fish in 14 different species for stocking in public waters across the state, according to the KDWP website. A just-hatched fish is considered a fry and anything to a length of about six inches is considered a fingerling fish.

But why go to all that effort?

“It's nearly impossible to naturally sustain a quality fishery in the state without hatchery supplementation,” Mosier said. “I could go out on a limb and say it's impossible to sustain a quality, high-impact fishery that receives a lot of attention as far as anglers are concerned — a fishery that's preyed upon heavily by anglers — without stocking.”

Of the 14 species of game fish the state raises for supplemental stocking programs, eight spend at least part of their lives at Farlington. Those species are hybrid sunfish, blue catfish, channel catfish, red-eared sunfish, saugeye, striped bass, walleye and Palmetto bass, a cross between a striped bass female and a white bass male.

The Farlington Lake Hatchery also raises grass carp, a non-game fish that's used primarily to keep smaller bodies of water free of underwater grasses that could clog the ponds, Mosier said.

The Farlington Lake Fish Hatchery sits on about 150 acres at Crawford State Park. There are 30 ponds with a total surface area of about 33 acres. When full, the ponds will hold almost 104 acre feet of water. One acre foot is the amount of water required to cover one acre to a depth of one foot, or almost 326,000 gallons.

Things get rolling at the hatchery about mid-March, Mosier said. The staff will begin harvesting channel catfish fingerlings that over-wintered at the hatchery. From Farlington, the young fish will be sent to the Milford Hatchery for another season of growth before being stocked into lakes.

Once the ponds are empty, preparations begin for the predacious fish season at Farlington Lake Hatchery. This year, for example, the hatchery received more than four million walleye eggs, which were hatched out and raised to a size of about 1.25-1.5 inches before being harvested in May and sent to other hatcheries to be raised to stock size.

It takes about six weeks from the time the eggs are fertilized for the fry to grow to the fingerling stage and be large enough to ship. The first 14 days, the eggs are kept in specialized hatching tanks.

“We typically harvest not because of the time, though, but because they tend to run out of food,” Mosier said. “We can only keep a plankton supply in the pond for so long before they eat their way out.”

Harvest consists of putting a fine-meshed screen over the outlet and draining the pond. All the young fish are forced by the retreating water into a u-shaped, concrete catch basin. The staff then scoop up the fish in nets, weigh them and ship them where they need to go. They travel in what amounts to an aquarium on wheels, a massive metal tank with its own air supply that will keep the fish alive and healthy on their journey.
The Farlington Hatchery raises fish both from eggs and from fry received from other hatcheries, Mosier said.

“The majority of the fish we do have here come in as fry and we raise them,” he said. “The fry that come in are usually not more than a few days old. You're talking really tiny fish.”

In addition to the walleye, the hatchery this year is scheduled to raise about 800,000 Palmetto bass, 300,000 white bass, some 150,000 blue catfish and about 400,000 channel catfish. The channel catfish is the bread-and-butter of the Farlington Fish Hatchery, he said.

“Channel cats are pretty much the mainstay of the hatchery here,” Mosier said. “They spend more time, use up more space and more dollars than anything else.”

The KDWP doesn't raise and stock every kind of fish anglers are after in the state. With some species, it doesn't do any good. The fish are able to establish and maintain fishable populations on their own, Mosier said.

The channel catfish is, in fact, one of those species. In the larger lakes, the fish is able to reproduce naturally and keep sufficient numbers without any outside help. But, at smaller lakes — including Farlington Lake, Mosier said — stocking is still necessary to keep anglers happy.

“State fishing lakes and smaller lakes like this one get hit very heavy by anglers,” Mosier said. “The shoreline to volume ration is such there's just not enough volume (in the lake) to support the population.”

KDWP also sponsors an urban fisheries program, where smaller, city-owned lakes in larger communities, including Kansas City, Topeka and Wichita, are stocked. Fish are delivered to those lakes as often as two or three times a month at a catchable size. The goal is to make fishing available, particularly to younger anglers, who might not otherwise have access to other opportunities, Mosier said.

The four hatcheries supply fish only to public-access lakes, bodies of water where the general public can fish. There are programs through KDWP, where lakes and ponds on private property can be stocked. But the owner of the lake has to agree to open access for anglers to qualify for the program, he said.

The fish hatcheries are in the business both of recreation and of conservation, Mosier said. And the work they do across the state helps guarantee people can continue to wile away their hours in a boat or sitting on the bank, chasing that ever-elusive lunker for years to come.

“Fish in the wild, without any human intervention, can sustain a viable population if they don't have any fishing pressure on them,” Mosier said. “But in order to keep up with fishing pressure, we've got to supplement with stocking.”

Girard Press

Never miss a story

Choose the plan that's right for you.
Digital access or digital and print delivery.